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I've had all my money with HSBC for more than 10 years now. So I was very surprised when I heard that they were selling all their upstate NY branches to First Niagara. This ended up being a good opportunity to move to a local bank with more personal service. We picked Canandaigua National Bank because they're one of the few locals and Rachelle worked for them as a floating teller during a few summers in college.

Once the decision was made it took a little thought to actually move over to it. We had a lot of accounts with direct deposits, auto-debits and even a few outstanding checks. We also had to open the new accounts with an initial deposit, so we had to time this very carefully.

So once we wrapped our heads around what we had to do we opened some new accounts (consolidating some), updated our direct deposits, moved some money and then went to close our old accounts. I was surprised how simple it was to close all of our HSBC accounts. They basically moved all our remaining money into one account, cut us a bank check and closed them all; it took about 25 minutes. It was kind of scary walking around with that bank check on the way to deposit it at CNB because it was basically all our money. If something had happened to that check we'd have be screwed.

Fast forward a few weeks and we are still getting mail from First Niagara. Just today actually they sent us new check books. Rachelle called them and asked why we continue to get things from them when they don't have any of our accounts. They told her that they don't have any information on us and that this is all automated. They said not to worry because they won't have any of our money so it won't really matter. I'm just curious if they're going to open up credit cards in our names for over-draft protection since we had that at HSBC. We'll have to pay attention to that and check back every few weeks.